CMV: Trashy parents are the reason American inner-city schools suck

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Funny, I come from a family of educators, I've been aware of the problems with public education in this country for more than 30 years now, I've listened to and read numerous people with advanced degrees and decades of experience talk about the problems with public education, and 'trashy parents' has never even come up once. Yes, asshole parents is a problem. No, it is not the problem; in fact, if you asked 100 teachers to give 100 different reasons for the problems in public schools I doubt very much that it would even make the list.

No, the reason inner-city schools suck is because school districts are funded by property taxes, so inner-city school districts are generally funded by the property taxes on very poor neighborhoods. Which means that those school districts are not going to have the resources to hire and retain good teachers or administrators, to give them reasonable classroom sizes, to provide a safe and productive learning environment, to provide learning materials, to provide activities like sports or music that can provide opportunities outside of the normal realm of possibilities for poor kids, etc. And conservative programs like charter schools, school choice vouchers, and so on tend to take money away from public schools to fund them.

If we were to pool all of the money earmarked for public schools within a given state and evenly divide it among schools weighted solely on the number of kids served by that school you would see inner-city schools rocket up the academic charts. The problem is that public schools in affluent middle-class neighborhoods would decline because of lack of resources, and middle-class America can't have that.

Like, yeah, you're kind of right. Trashy parents are a significant problem for many schools, not just inner city ones.

But if you say the problem with schools is that parents are trashy, well, that's kind of a hard problem to solve. Trashiness is something we think of as being a problem of culture and upbringing, which you can't change.

So instead, you might ask, "why are the parents so trashy?" or "what can we do to mitigate the trashiness of the parents?"

And the answer to the first question is that a lot of adults live high stress lives and don't have time to develop good parenting because our society fails to take care of the wellness of lower class, lower educated people, and often forces them to work and often gives them a bad deal to stoke their resentment of the system. You could say that culture needs to be developed to solve this, so the problem of trashy parents is itself caused by a cultural problem in the U.S., or you might say the government should change circumstances for the poor, so the problem of trashy parents is caused by bad government. These are a bit more solvable problems than the parents being trashy.

And the answer to the second question is that a lot of schools systems (this is teachers, admin, school boards, all the way up to local government) fail to make policies that protect the integrity of schools from the effects of trashy parents. So you could say this is a government problem, which is a bit more solvable of a problem than the parents being trashy.

Why would you say that any sociological problem caused by a single reason?

Do you think there's a reason that 'trashy parents' tend to live in the 'inner city'?

(Also, are you aware that people have been using 'entitled poor' as a dogwhistle since at least Reagen, if not longer?)

Kids having kids are a big part of this problem as they themselves didn't have time to grow to into fully functioning adults with social skills and the cycle perpetuates upon itself.

Your argument seems to boil down to “angry aggressive parents with short attention spans raise poorly behaved children.”

Allow me to point you to a common cause for both:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis?wprov=sfti1

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10473289.2001.10464271

https://journals.lww.com/epidem/abstract/2019/11000/acute_air_pollution_exposure_and_the_risk_of.4.aspx

Summarizing those: for decades, poor people were more likely to consume lead, and had higher blood levels of lead. Lead in your blood makes you stupid and aggressive.

Today, poor people are more likely to live in areas of concentrated air pollution.

Concentrated air pollution makes you dumber and more aggressive.

This is a Very simplified summary. There’s more - water pollution, microplastics, even the study that showed that falling into poverty literally made people dumber. 

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE97S10Y/#:~:text=Far%20from%20signaling%20that%20poor,missed%20a%20whole%20night's%20sleep.

The problem is that what can cause a crappy life outcome (bad at school, criminal issues, etc) is literally being poor. And that crappy life generally leads to…. being poor.

So poverty causes the personality things you’re describing, which keeps someone trapped in poverty.

Ok. Now do rural schools. Especially in the South. Funding for schools being from property tax and not unilateral means crappy schools are just one of disfunctions related to poverty that replicate themseld and just become an imbedded rut. But at least you got to Edge Out over THOSE PEOPLE. And I've been the only white guy on the block in freaking Highland Park Detroit. I know how shit can get. But you across as not as much of a "big picture" guy that you think you are.

The thing is— human behavior is a feedback loop. People in general don’t decide who they are, that sort of power only comes in the rarified positions of the upper class. Most people are formed by conditions. Poverty creates the parents, and by extension the children, you’re complaining about.

Impulsivity, anger, lower intelligence, stunted attention spans. These are things which come from generational wealth and health inequality. The stress of being REALLY poor from a young age pretty much fries your brain. You add in the racial element and you’re essentially talking about large scale groups with CPTSD, higher rates of birth defects and cancers due to environmental conditions and high stress loads. (I’m happy to source a lot of this if you’re interested)

I’m from the hood and the conditions of life outside of it were mind boggling to me once I got out.

You cannot analyze large scale sociological problems at the level of behavior and expect to get MUCH of an answer. All of these things are driven by material conditions. To blame the parents is a bit like me blaming Farmers for a bad harvest during a drought.

Pray tell, do you teach at an inner city school? Were you educated at one? Do you have kids who go to one? Where may I ask are you getting this information you are basing this assessment on as it may well be difficult to change your view unless we know what kind of evidence you're going off of.

I think most of the neglect I experienced from my parents growing up in the suburbs was primarily and mostly related to the time, stress, and energy it took them to make sure my siblings and I had a safe home, and food on the table, along with the priorities of family vacations and activities for the kids.

We were not scraping by in poverty, but I am still able to point to specific circumstances of times they had to work which meant that I was left responsible for myself and my siblings for long stretches of times. There's debate about parentification, and the usefulness of giving kids responsibilities they can handle, but my subjective interpretation was that a lot of the times that we were with babysitters or family members were because my parents needed to prioritize chasing those Benjamins. (Understood in retrospect, not explicitly explained as a kid, just knowing for these days work is work, so we're staying with grandma, or you're ordering pizza for you & your brothers and getting everyone in bed because work is late... etc)

When i think about the context of living in an under-served neighborhood with limited public community spaces, concerns about safety due to crime (& over-policing, too) along with the stress of intergenerational poverty, mental health challenges related to poverty (& otherwise) I cannot even begin to conceptualize how stressful that would be for a parent, and how it's a whole lot easier for someone more privileged, looking in, to comfort themselves about how that's the parent's fault their kids are suffering.

Because if we acknowledge that the repercussions of our economic and community norms impact children in harmful ways, and this is one of them, we'd have to do a whole lot more work, to dismantle a system which actually mostly benefits us in comforts and illusions of safety.

It's a comforting delusion, that individuals are solely and only responsible for their circumstances. Our species evolved in collaborative interconnectedness, and while our communities have changed, the way we succeed at life or fail, it's ultimately rooted in how we're able to be accountable to each other, and especially the most vulnerable.

Hierchy that we live in, though, it's working out really well for a few, and those are who spend a lot of time and energy preaching the individualistic marketing messages which keep the status quo going.

So do you have any evidence to support your post? Because this seems more like a rant.

If public schools had student to teacher of 10 or 12 to a teacher, many of this problems would disappear. There are many other reasons but classes of more than 25 are really difficult to deal with. There are other reasons including a group of parents that can be combative with the school system or distrusting of young white teachers with a lack of cultural awareness. School and education are complex and it isn’t a simple as just blaming parents or teacher or culture or whatever.

I was a school photographer for half a decade (seeing the insides of 100+ schools) and then went to work full time in electoral politics afterwards.

Shitty parents exist in the suburbs and in rural areas too, what's fundamentally different is the tax base vs population.

Schools get their budget through whatever tax money they can raise. Almost all of these major city schools are dealing with population decline. Baltimore, Philadelphia, Detroit, and the like all experienced severe white flight. This lead to some of the strongest taxpayers leaving and essentially being replaced with nobody. The buildings are old but needed to fill the still quite large number of students, but in desperate need of repairs and upkeep which has to come first with limited funds.

When I worked in Philadelphia I met some teachers who had to fight to get extra funds just to remove asbestos from the buildings they worked in. It's still a serious problem.

Misbehaving kids and enabling parents exist everywhere in enough supply to cause problems. Maybe you could argue more exist in some places vs others, but it only takes one really dedicated person to ruin a multi-person social outing. This principle carries to larger groups too. At a certain point in a population of 100 people it doesn't meaningfully change things if you have 15 people causing issues or 30 people causing issues.

What suburban school districts have are funds. Student intervention programs, an abundance of school councilors and student advisors, lunch monitors, hall monitors, rooms for in school suspensions as well as teacher trained to deal with disobedient students etc.

Inner city schools often can't even get teacher certified to teach in their own subjects. How are they going to get their next string of needs?

How is your claim different from "poor people are bad and it's their fault for being bad"? It's a foundational American view that poor people, who receive the very least support from society, are at fault for every negative experience and outcome in their lives, and thus should receive even less support, thus ensuring even worse experiences and outcomes for them in the future. It's a self-perpetuating cycle that does its best to guarantee a permanent underclass.

Also, if you think trashiness is particular to inner cities, I have to imagine you have spent very little time in rural communities.

I agree that parents are a huge problem with schools. Two of my cousins are teachers and have watched it decline over several decades. They agree parents are part of the problem. Not the whole problem, but definitely a part of it that tends to be soul-crushing.

One of them works half days in two schools - one is in a poorer district and one in a more affluent district. (for reference, this is a midwestern town of 25K) They both have problems, just different kinds. The poorer kids tend to have parents that don't care as much. The kids' needs aren't being met (clothes. food, attention) and they have more disruptive behavioral problems. The richer kids have less respect for the teachers and more entitlement. The problem parents will make life hell for the school if they perceive that their little angel is being unfairly picked on, misunderstood, or that they deserve better grades.

These are both problems with the parents, but they are very different types of problems. I disagree with how you've framed your premise, specifically that it's only trashy parents and that it's only inner-city schools.

Obviously the majority of people are decent parents and aren't causing problems and do care for their kids. The problem is that the ones who don't care or the ones causing drama can rapidly bring down the standards and make life hell for everyone.

A lot of the behavior you describe as trashy also could be described as PTSD or trauma responses.

As someone who was raised in a rural town, you’ve just described most of the kids I grew up with and their parents.

Many of my classmates were barely literate by the time we graduated.

American schools also almost universally suck. We spend more than every country except one on education (in a per capita basis) yet we don’t have any enforceable actions to keep kids in schools or to throw shit kids out of classrooms where those kids disrupt learning.

In my experience moving to the US, I already knew multiplication tables and division by grade 2, and when I came to the US I was still coloring in grade 3 and learning numbers.

Today, we have remedial reading classes in COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES.

Additionally, teachers are required or encouraged to give kids 50% on tests and assignments they don’t do whatsoever. Kids aren’t held back, and they’re graduated to keep graduation rates inflated.

We don’t have an education system. We have a babysitting system with educators as babysitters.

Yes, parents are a huge part of the problem. Until we have some forced solutions to keep kids in schools and learning in schools with responsibilities and consequences for both child and parent, it’ll stay the way it is - with kids not being able to read, do math, or think critically.

I don’t think that you’re wrong fundamentally but the problem goes back farther usually people who are bad parents and bad with money come from backgrounds where they were neglected abused or otherwise taught self-destructive habits.

I don’t imagine that this is a problem which is going to be spontaneously solved so really I thing the core problem is that schools and other institutions either enable bad behaviors or disproportionately punish people past the point of recovery.

Take the example of child who survived violence or abuse. They might be volatile reacting to unconscious cues, which might either make teachers or potential social connections recoil leaving them isolated despite them not otherwise being able to feel safe. Or else they are punished for trying to protect themselves in the only ways they know how up to the point of legal charges, which go on to affect their treatment and their prospects.

If our institutions were trauma-informed, at the very least we wouldn’t be taking abused people and making them more traumatized.

poor people are like people, and there are good and bad among them. [...] And the bad ruin it for everybody.

Assuming you're not saying that these "bad people" are an inherited deficit in any one population, which would be pretty suspect and very difficult to prove, what you can then conclude is that for whatever reason, poor people are more vulnerable to the impact of these so-called bad people. Or perhaps something about poverty makes the complex of features that you describe as a "bad person" more likely.

You can't arbitrarily draw the line of causation at present-day people who are making decisions you disagree with. They're the product of their upbringing and environment as well, as are the people and environment that raised them. Why is our society so difficult for people who aren't born with money? Or who don't have stable family lives? These things are related to large scale policy choices that we're making at a local, national, and societal level.

I think I need you to define what exactly you mean by “trashy parenting” because not many people agree with each other on what qualifies. 

For what it’s worth, I think you’re basing your option off a stereotype that might have some basis of truth, but it’s greatly over exaggerated. No one seems to have hard data on this (probably because “trashy parenting is so ill-defined) but my anecdotal experience is quite different from what you describe. 

I’ve worked in an inner-city school for 6 years and I have found parents to be very engaged and overall pretty good at holding their kids accountable for their mistakes. I’ve worked in suburban schools too, and I by and large don’t see a difference. I should qualify that I’m in a Catholic school, not a public school, so that might change the results a bit. 

I’ve also seen people who fit the description you give. But far fewer than normal parents. 

You’re partially right: parents who are failing to reinforce (and often actively undermining) the lessons taught in school are a problem. Parents who can’t or don’t set a good example of responsible adulthood are a problem. Parents who can’t or don’t supply a safe home environment conducive to a secure childhood are a problem.

All of these versions of bad parents are a symptom of a failed social structure that allows this to happen. For that to happen you’ve got to have failures at a ton of levels from their parents, their extended families, their broader neighborhood/church/community, their educational system, and the government safety net programs.

We need to invest, seriously, and with talent and resources, not just throwing money at the problem, if we’re going to fix the broken parts of our society.

We had a family in the school I taught. We were out for recess and one child said how their home was cold.

I talked to the secretary who told me to talk to another teacher who goes to the same church and she will tell me the whole story.

This family, they sign up for welfare when you’re 18 because it is just what you do. The church gives them all this free stuff (food, washing machine, detergent, toilet paper, Christmas presents) but when the church asks for help from them, like serving food during a funeral, or help with an activity, they always say no.

And then they train the children to ask for money and other things.

You've explained why the parents suck, why the kids suck, but I don't see how that correlates to making the schools suck, which you really haven't explained.

I see an example of a teacher getting beaten up. Presuming that makes the teachers suck, what about everyone else involved in the school system? Are they beating up the principle, the superintendent and the secretary of education too?

I don't buy that these parents are so lazy to be devoid of any engagement with their own life or their childrens, while simultaneously being so involved that they are able to effect the entire school system at every level. 

Trashy parents are just one small reason why inner city schools suck. Other reasons include: lack of funding, which leads to lack of adequate staffing and high turnover, lack of parent involvement in children's lives (could be due to working multiple jobs, using drugs, being in prison), pressures to either fit in or stand out (think the absolute recklessness of teens acting out for clout or TikTok fame). It's a multi faceted issue.

Can’t change your view. I agree. My kid goes to a school with a waitlist and acceptance policy. If you don’t behave, you’re out. It is so different than where I went to school and teachers got cussed out and occasionally attacked. Then the kid wouldn’t even be expelled and the teacher had to have that kid back in their class after suspension.

I'll never understand why, in a country where the billionaires pay nothing in taxes, its still socially acceptable to bitch about poor people.

For fuck's sake, they don't want to be poor, they aren't living the dream. It isn't easy to just better your situation.

The billionaires are useless shit bags that extract billions of dollars from hardworking people and pay no taxes. If you want to bitch about someone, how about them?

This is why I'm a fan of charter schools. They give the parents who do care another option. 

Sadly the right wing mentality is to still blame one segment of society for it. We wont discuss the shitty parents in things hardly more than a tar paper shack who are told the left is the reason they live like that and COLLECT welfare.

And they have all the education funding and keep trying to make their kids dumber than a sack of hammers too. We need to deal with certain leaders too, but please....keep sharing your wisdom.

I love such highly selective outrage.

This is just a useless rant with no solutions. The love to criticize "the Left" but it's not like the Righties are making a concerted effort to get involved in big city public school districts and attempt to address the deep-seated problems.

take a good school and a bad school and switch just the students not hte teachers and look what happens. Parents are 100% the reason certain schools are ranked terribly. Most are single mothers, no fathers, and very low income.

I would argue that the entire premise of having rich and poor schools is far more problematic that parents.

We should simply make sure that every single school district gets the same level of resources.

The parents are trashy because the school they went to were trash.

It's a cycle. Once a local community school goes down for a generation. It takes double the work to fix it

Schools are funded by property tax, which means inner city schools are severely underfunded as compared to any other school. This isn't even a secret, everyone knows this.

People get this way as a result of living in a hellish environment. To say that they are intrinsically this way would essentially be a form of racism.

The mom in this video thought his grades were okay.

Completely agree. And no amount of school funding will fix this problem. It's a societial issue.

What values are important to us as a society and how can we promote those values?

Corporations not paying taxes while being handed subsidies contribute far more to schools, police, fire and infrastructure “sucking” 100 times more than a parent working for one of those companies for minimum wage and no benefits.

White flight and under funding are why inner city schools suck

Parenting or lack thereof is the root of a lot of problems